Belonging and Genocide: Hitler's Community, 1918-1945
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN: 0300198280
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Exploring private letters, diaries, memoirs, secret reports, trial records, and other documents, this author shows how the Nazis used such common human needs as community, belonging, and solidarity to forge a nation conducting the worst crime in history.
The Philosopher's Stone: Alchemy and the Secret Research for Exotic Matter
Treblinka Survivor: The Life and Death of Hershl Sperling
Know whether he actually is shot; I don’t even want to know.” However, “as I learn later on the Jew actually was bumped off.”3 Farnbacher knew about international laws of war; he was aware of soldierly traditions of chivalry toward the defeated enemy soldier and of mercy to the enemy civilian. He realized that none of them mattered in this “strange war.” The truth was that he too did not always care that much 96 spreading complicity about them. Early in July, after having heard that some men.
Champagne when a bomb hit the bunker. “One dead and four casualties.” Those who survived moved even closer together. Death fed community.72 Christmassy idyll or melancholic singing easily merged into a bawling jag. You were not supposed to stay away when boozing was on the comrades’ plate.73 Lifting a glass together strengthened comradeship, just as did sharing food parcels, common singing, or storming into the battle. The booze made soldiers forget about frictions, frustrations, and.
Cleansing campaigns and plundering trips came from the conviction that they were above civilian society and indeed the rest of the world. As a result of the battles of 1941 to 1943 and the German occupation, huge territories of the Soviet Union suffered from devastation, desertion, and depopulation. From spring 1942, millions of Russian civilians were forced into abusive labor service for Germans; Wehrmacht soldiers in the role of colonial slave hunters did their share in destroying families,.
FIrm in spite of everything, that it is a chosen people. Should we still lose, then I don’t know what you can call a just cause,” stated Helmut Wißmann already in summer 1943, faced with Italy’s “treachery.”112 Standing “firm in spite of everything,” sticking together, even as a pariah nation, was the morality of shame culture. Nothing was more important to it than social cohesion. The good and morally right person was the one who, regardless of personal scruples, uncertainties, or anxieties,.
Broader sense, it proved the genocidal ideology that legitimized ethnic cleansing as a disinfection measure to save Germandom. When the Osteinsatz girls had done their job and a Volhynian-German family could move into the “disinfected” home, they also became advisers to the new male family head on household issues. But climbing the ladder of gender hierarchy did not end there. Maschmann and her female comrades took over even more decisively “man’s work.” When an SS officer could not find enough men.